It’s time for the parking practices of the past to be swept out in favor of a new way to handle parking at offices.
Square footage rented ≠ parking needs
In many commercial buildings with multiple tenants and on-site parking, landlords typically assign on-site parking proportional to the square footage rented. For example, in a 100,000 square foot building with two floors — one tenant on each — and 100 parking spots, each tenant would typically be given 50 parking spots.
Problem is, their parking needs are rarely proportional to the square footage rented.
One floor might contain an accounting firm, where everyone comes to the office five days and week but only from 9-5, creating demand for 75 parking spots. Another floor might be a sales office of a technology company, with many team members who travel to sales meetings or frequently work remotely. The salespeople are also younger, and tend to own fewer cars — meaning they only need 25 parking spots.
At the typical commercial office building, half of the sales office’s parking would sit empty every day while the accounting firm’s employees would be increasingly frustrated about the lack of parking, as their spots would fill up every day.
Even more likely, the accounting employees, seeing dozens of empty spots nearby sit empty regularly, would probably start parking in unauthorized spots, creating bad blood and resulting in frequent tickets or tows.
Instead, the building should just do one of two things:
- “unbundle” parking altogether — separating it from the commercial office space and not “bundling” it with the office lease. Instead, lease spots on a daily or monthly basis to workers at either firm, regardless of for whom they work. Spots could be leased at a price of a few dollars a day (reducing demand for parking a bit) or for free.
You could even offer spots monthly, and — using Parkade — people who rent them can offer them “back in the pool” on the days/weeks they’re out of town. - Allow the offices to reshare their assigned parking spots when not in use with other commercial tenants.
Parkade makes it easy
This can be done easily through Parkade. Here’s how.
- Activate your building on Parkade
- [If unbundling your spots] Add your parking spots to Parkade and set the prices
- [If not unbundling] Add each company’s HR/facilities head to the app, and have them add their respective parking spots.
- Have each company invite their employees to app, so they can lease spots and/or share their assigned/rented spots.
Reach out to Parkade on our Get Started page, and our team can walk you through the process. It’s a snap!
